


Five Times Alex Got A Slice of Yassen’s Present and One Time He Got A Slice of His Past

by theyre_my_babies



Series: Alex Rider: Five Times Alex and Yassen Were In Love [4]
Category: Alex Rider - Anthony Horowitz
Genre: Alex Rider is a Pretty Pretty Princess, Coffee Shops, Kittens, M/M, Not A Coffeshop AU, Or Is It?, Origami, This Fandom Needs More Traditional Trope Fics, Tropes, alive!Yassen Gregorovich
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-04-19 03:14:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4730762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theyre_my_babies/pseuds/theyre_my_babies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yassen retires. Shenanigans ensue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Alex Got A Slice of Yassen’s Present and One Time He Got A Slice of His Past

**Author's Note:**

> Ughhhhhh finally got this out I've been working on it forever it feels like. I've had most of it done for days but couldn't figure out the last part.

1.

“Have you ever considered taking up a hobby?” Reed gasped, eyes shocked wide staring at Yassen, who had just kicked open the window next to his desk. “Like, one that doesn’t involve scaring people half to death?”

“Like what?” asked Yassen, who had really only come over because he was bored. Alex was, for once, at school, and Yassen knew how rare that was for him and how much he liked getting to pretend his life wasn’t crazy, so he wasn’t going to mess that up. Ben was doing paperwork at ‘6, and Yassen didn’t really feel like dropping in on him while he was doing paperwork, because Ben was BORING and actually cared about that stuff. So, Reed.

“Knitting, maybe?” Reed asked, picking up his glasses from where they’d fallen off his face in the fall and wiping them off and putting them back on. “Or, I don’t know - video games? Ever heard of Assassin’s Creed?”

Yassen stared at Reed.

Reed shook his head. “You know what? No. Forget that last one. But what about - sudoku? Or yoga?”

“But I like scaring people half to death.”

“It would probably scare Alex half to death to see you doing some of those yoga poses,” Reed muttered, thinking back to when he’d gone over to his girlfriend’s house one day to find her doing the ‘formidable face pose’. “Just get on Google and look up ‘hobbies’.”

“Hm.” Yassen walked past where Reed was leaning against his desk still and leaned in over his computer. “Google, ‘hobbies’... Wikipedia, list of hobbies. 3D printing, no, board games, no, cosplaying, no, flower arranging, no, foreign language learning, done that, genealogy, what genealogy?, knife making, lego building, model building - origami?”

Reed’s eyes popped open.

“Hm.” Yassen clicked on the link. “I heard a story once, about a girl who had leukemia. She wanted to make a thousand paper cranes so that she could make a wish and get well…”

“You want to make a thousand paper cranes?”

“Hm? No, that would get monotonous… But origami. I like it…”

When Alex dropped by Yassen’s new house after football practice that evening, he found Yassen sitting in the living room, surrounded by -  
“Is that - origami?” Alex asked, slightly afraid of the answer.

“Yes.”

“What - ?”

“Butterflies.” Yassen sent a red one flying in Alex’s direction and it landed in Alex’s cupped hands. “Reed said I need a hobby that doesn’t scare people half to death.”

Alex stared at the area around Yassen, then looked at the rest of the room, which was dotted in various kinds of flowers. “Yassen, never change.”

2.

“Why is my bed not covered in nekos?” Alex asked as he exited his room one afternoon. “And where is Yassen, anyways?”

Ben shrugged without looking away from the fridge. “He hasn’t been here all day? The unit was around earlier, but I haven’t seen him since he picked you up for breakfast this morning.”

“Weird.” Alex reached for his phone on the kitchen counter. “I’ll t-”

The door to the apartment burst open.

“Alex I got the job!”

Alex just stared, frozen, as Yassen kicked the door closed and grabbed him to kiss him. “What?”

“I told you I was going to get a really mundane job!” Yassen laughed. “I had an interview at Starbucks today. I start next Monday!”

“Huh.” Ben blinked. “Don’t maim anyone.”

“Except the MI6 execs,” Alex corrected. “If the MI6 execs come in, you can maim them. Jones retired and now they’re all awful.”

“Text me when they come in for coffee,” Yassen said, kissing Alex’s forehead. “I’ll put something in their drinks.”

3.

“Lily!”

“What?” Yassen glanced up from his manga. “The flowers on your kitchen table this morning were kawasaki roses, not lilies.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “No, that mission Ben and I were talking about this morning? He mentioned to Crawley that we’d talked about me going on mission as a girl instead of an innocent teenager. Crawley thought it was good and Riddle agreed to it and they’re calling me Lily! You can’t maim Riddle now. Did you ever ask Talia about makeup?”

“She sent me a couple of YouTube tutorials,” Yassen said, chuckling. He set his book down. “I picked up a few things last week. Would you like to come see?”

Alex beamed. “Practice on me so we can take pictures and send them to Tom and Tim and Sabina. Tim and Sab are going to be jealous that I’m a prettier girl than them!”

“Of course, Alex. Counter.”

Alex hopped up to sit on the counter. “So, what’s first?”

“Primer.”

Alex stared at Yassen reached into a new box on the counter. “What?”

“It goes on your face.”

Alex waited dumbly as Yassen stroked full-face makeup onto him.

“I feel ridiculous,” Alex said when Yassen was done with a container of green-purple-white-yellow stuff.

Yassen chuckled. “It’s corrector. It has instructions that say what everything is for. Would you like to read it?”

Alex shrugged. “As long as you’re doing my makeup? No, thanks. I’ll let you handle it.”

“All right. Now foundation.”

A few minutes later, Yassen finally brushed on blush - the first thing he’d done that Alex had heard of, makeup-wise.

“Hm.” Yassen laned back and examined Alex’s face. “We can probably leave your eyebrows. I like them and I don’t want to mess with them.”

Alex stared at Yassen in horror. “My _eyebrows_?”

“We’re leaving them alone,” Yassen promised. “Eyeshadow, eyeliner, mascara.”

“I’ve heard of eyeshadow!” Alex said proudly.

Yassen chuckled. “Hold very still for this, Alex. I don’t want to get anything in your eyes. And Talia says it’s an awful mess to clean up.”

“Mhmm.” Alex closed his eyes and patiently waited as Yassen applied so many brushes to his eyelids and eyelashes.

“Open.”

Alex opened his eyes.

“Keep holding still,” Yassen commanded quietly. “I’m going to curl your eyelashes and then apply mascara.”

Alex held as Yassen brought a scary-looking metal implement to his face and after holding his eyelashes in it for what felt like forever exchanged it for a black brush that stuck to his eyelashes uncomfortably for a moment and left some kind of residue on them.

“Lips now,” Yassen said, smiling. “This is a long-last liquid lipstick; the brand is Stila and the color is Rosa. Sabina, if not Tim, will be very jealous.”

“Mm, of my perfect boyfriend,” Alex teased, before realizing what he’d said. “My - ex-supreme enemy who kisses me and does my makeup and is generally perfect. Shutting up now. Make me a princess.”

Yassen chuckled. “We’re going to just do this the easy way today,” he promised. “So you can show off. Open your mouth, pull your lips back taut.”

When Yassen was done, he screwed the brush back into the bottle and reached over for a handheld mirror. “You’re the prettiest girl.”

Alex blushed as he smiled into the mirror. “I actually look like a princess,” he said, stunned. “Like - Cinderella.”

Yassen’s face melted into something self-satisfied and pleased. “Yes. Hm, should I share you with your friends like this? Or should I keep you all for myself?”

“One picture,” Alex laughed lightly. “That’s it. Then kiss me.”

4.

“ _That_ ’s the guy you’re with?”

Yassen could hardly have missed the loud whisper, as it was in fact about him. Alex had brought a his friends to Starbucks after their football game that afternoon. Alex had gestured to Yassen - presumably, satisfying the curiosity of his friends about at least one aspect of his life - and it had been a matter of only a few seconds before one of them made the shocked comment.

“Well, I do have a reputation to think of,” Alex joked. He turned to face Yassen and smiled at him. “Hey, Charming.”

Yassen raised an eyebrow. “What can I get for you, Princess?”

Alex laughed as his friends groaned or stared disbelievingly. “I would like a white chocolate mocha.”

“That’s on the house for a face like that,” Yassen said. He half-glared at the group behind Alex. “And the rest of you?”

“You have a scary boyfriend,” Tom whispered to Alex.

Alex rolled his eyes. “Not my boyfriend,” he whispered back. They’d clearly had the discussion before.

“I would like a caffe Americano,” James announced over the other two. “Please.”

“£2. And for the small one?” Yassen asked. Tom wondered if he could develop Alex’s ninja skills in .002 seconds and sink into the shadows and away from that terrifying stare.

“Latte,” he squeaked.

“£2.25. Be a minute,” Yassen said, suddenly all cheerful customer-service.

“Scary boyfriend,” Tom muttered.

5.

“So I’ve gotten used to _my_ room being covered in _origami_ cats, but… Yassen, there appears to be a cat and kittens in a box in the busted part of the couch.”

Yassen walked out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on his apron. "Yes, apparently your cat had a lady friend over here while we were on that mission a while back and now there are kittens. The mother's name is Natasha and the kittens are Connery, Niven, Lazenby, Moore, and Dalton.”

"Huh." Alex watched as Natasha glared at him disinterestedly and the kittens fed. "You did that because I named my cat after you, didn’t you.”

Yassen shrugged. “This way if your employers ever come knocking they won’t suspect anything,” he said, laying a gentle hand on one of the kittens. “Naming kittens after James Bond is proof of my innocence in any situation.”

Natasha gave a kind of sigh, like she was resigned to this by now, and let him do it.

“Where do you think she came from?” Alex asked.

“She used to belong to the people next door,” Yassen said sadly. “They left her. I think Yassen knew she needed a new home.”

Alex watched as Yassen stroked the kittens for a moment. He smiled softly.

“Me too, Natasha,” he murmured. “Me too.”

And 1.

“Yassen, I hope you don’t mind, we’re going to have company for dinner tonight,” Alex called as he opened the door to Yassen’s home. The mission had only taken about a week, and Alex had been with the current K-Unit - Eagle, Snake, Wintergreen, and Jason’s new replacement, Swan, so Yassen hadn’t been too worried and had chosen to stay home with the kittens - especially since there was another litter due that week. “I picked up a new friend in Russia from the GRU, he’s-”

“Dima?” Yassen asked, staring at Alex’s new friend from the kitchen.

Alex glanced between them.

The new friend squinted at Yassen. “-Yasha?”

Alex glanced between them, curious. “You two know each other?”

Yassen’s eyes widened. “It’s Yassen, now. Come in, sit down. I’ve ordered Thai. Alex, Dima took me in, in Moscow, after the death of my family. Dima, you joined intelligence?” The three of them went into the living room to sit and wait on the food.

“There was a fire at the old place the night you left us, a contact of Fagin’s got me in the business,” Dima said, amazed. “How did you make it all the way here? I thought for sure you had- had died, or been put in prison, or something, after you didn’t come out of that apartment.”

Yassen shook his head. “It is better not to speak of it,” he said. “I - was ‘deceased,’ for awhile, but there were people with the appropriate resources who wanted me alive, and so I am here. Tell me, Dima - how did you come to meet Sasha?”

“It wasn’t by any good fortune,” Dima said, glancing at Alex.

Alex shook his head. “The new guy - Swan. Turned traitor on us. He set us up. Locked us up in a freezer and left us for dead. But Dima was working the case from the Russian side, and happened to be in the building when Swan ditched us.”

“I had been looking for your Swan,” Dima explained. “So I was clearing the building. I wouldn’t have known your people were there, except that I could tell the freezer had been tampered with, so I thought to check it and found them inside.”

“What happened to Swan?” Yassen demanded.

“Dead,” Alex said. “Cyanide tablet.”

Yassen shook his head. “Perhaps _I_ will screen the next one myself.”

A knock at the door signalled the arrival of dinner. While they ate, the talking mostly died down.

“I’ll take clean-up,” Alex offered when they were finished. He got up to gather the trash and take it to the trash can. “Yassen, you want to get the cats?”

Yassen rose and turned to go put food in the cat bowls. Then he paused, and looked at Dima. 

“Dima,” he said, “you used to pick up some strays. How would you like a kitten?”

**Author's Note:**

> I have created an Alex Rider tumblr! I reblog related things, ship Yalex, wonder about Alex Rider headcanons, and post updates on my Alex Rider fics! sentimental-russian-angst.tumblr.com


End file.
